


Seas Between Us Now Have Roared

by wonder_at_unlawful_things



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M, M/M, Mentions of Violence, New Year's Eve, Pregnancy, Swearing, but not yet, sad boys are sad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-21
Updated: 2018-01-21
Packaged: 2019-03-07 15:10:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,024
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13437435
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wonder_at_unlawful_things/pseuds/wonder_at_unlawful_things
Summary: New Year's Eve, 1979. Sirius and Remus on the Potters' roof, reflecting. James and Lily have an announcement.New Year's Eve, 1995. Same song. A different year.





	Seas Between Us Now Have Roared

**Author's Note:**

> According to the Internet, the full moon in January 1980 was on the second. In 1996 it was the fifth, but writers may have their liberties. 
> 
> I'm sorry this is maudlin, but also I looked up the lyrics to Auld Lang Syne, so there we are.

December 31, 1979

“Maybe now it ends,” Sirius said, his eyes bright, looking out over the back garden. He and Remus were sitting on the roof, drinking. It was cold but neither of them felt it, both huddled together under Sirius’s leather jacket.  
Remus lit a cigarette and didn’t say anything. Sirius knew what he had to be thinking, could feel the hardness making its way through his veins, just like it had the night the war really broke out; the fall after they’d graduated, when they’d been on a trip to Hogsmeade together and the others had gone to bed and then the news came and Remus’s face had gone hard and he’d just said “I knew it, I fucking knew it,” and they’d walked in the chill and the dark for hours, smoking. Remus had smoked desperately, fast, hungry, like he was trying to suck poison down faster.  
Sirius hadn’t known what to do then, and he didn’t know what to do now. It had been, strangely, worse on that night, when he hadn’t known the shape of war, when he’d only ever seen dead bodies old and pale and casketed. When he’d still wanted to hope it could be all right. And that anger in Remus, so different than his own. Sirius’s temper was fast and harsh and uncontrollable but quickly burnt out, a lightning flash of rage and then over, but Remus, now, so calm, so difficult to anger properly, was all cold fury, and the only other time Sirius had seen him so angry was after the very bad thing Sirius had done, and just the thought of it had made him quiet and scared.  
Now he touched Remus’s elbow under the jacket and said, “A new decade,” and tried to smile. He was twenty and Remus was nineteen, the long cold winter stretching between their birthdays, but Remus had always seemed older. Sometimes—now—Sirius felt childish next to him, felt the largeness of his eyes in his face, the quivering hope in it, and wished he could be better. Sturdier. More knowledgeable. When he tried to hold Remus and say calming stable adult things he usually felt like he was pretending a little (except when it was really bad, for some reason then— for some reason it had always been like that, if something was absolutely terrible Sirius could handle it, so terrible that it wiped out thought and just left instinct. At least his instincts, it seemed, were good).  
“It’s not going to end,” Remus said. He was always saying this, half-furious at Sirius and James, who were so sure they were going to win and that everything was going to be all right. They were sure of it even when they were retching in corners looking at friends’ mangled bodies. It was almost offensive, the pair of them, their certainty. It was the day before the full moon and he was furious, every inch of him, his blood hot and every ligament stretched and desperate, the wolf in his brain pacing. “They hate us. Me. They hate me. They hate Lily. It’s been bloody centuries, Sirius. It’s not going to just go away now it’s been let out. Now they have permission. They’re not just going to stop and all sing kum bay yah and learn that really we’re all just people or whatever. They’re killing us, do you understand that? They want us all dead.”  
Unspoken, burning, always, but not you. Even though it wasn’t true, not anymore. Like Remus hadn’t seen the evidence on Sirius’s skin. Like he hadn’t walked in on him one day in the bathroom to find him half-shaven and staring at himself in the mirror, silent, fixed, watching a droplet of blood run down his neck, tracking it with his eyes, mouthing curses at his own pure blood.  
“Of course I know that,” Sirius said, quietly. He looked into the sky, searching out his star by old habit. There were a lot of them he didn’t like to look at, now.  
“Then how can you—”  
“Not everybody thinks like that,” he said, whispering, into his knees. “Maybe it’ll get better.”  
It wouldn’t. They knew it. Both of them. But Remus let the anger drain away, put out his cigarette, and took Sirius’s hand.  
They sat, Sirius leaning his head on Remus’s shoulder, quiet and thinking but for once not fighting, not angry, the air between them still and even a little happy, and then— 

“There you two are, you wankers,” said James Potter, his head emerging from the window. “I thought maybe you’d gone off to shag in a closet or something.”  
“Fuck you, Prongs,” Sirius said amiably.  
“And that’s where the good firewhisky went, too,” James said, clambering onto the roof with them and grabbing the bottle. “Bastards.”  
“If only,” Sirius said.  
James opened the bottle and drank.  
“I’ve gotta tell you something,” he said.  
“Where’s Pete?” Remus asked, suddenly. “Shouldn’t he—”  
“He’ll be here later, he’s doing something for his mum, but listen, I’ve got to tell you now or I’m going to actually explode, I almost caved and told you, Pads, like five bloody times this week when I thought we were about to die horribly—”  
“Told me what, you fucking drama queen,” said Sirius, but his eyes weren’t laughing.  
“Listen—but I wasn’t allowed and now Lily finally said I can, so—”  
“Wait, what is this?” Remus said, “What do you mean, Lily said—”  
“She’s pregnant, Moons,” James said, his eyes gone all gooey and warm, “and she like just found out, she took the test last week and—”  
“Holy shit,” Sirius said, “Merlin. Fuck. Holy shit, Jamie—”  
“I know,” James said, laughing.  
“Congratulations,” Remus said, smiling, but there was a shadow in it. Sirius’s eyes caught his and knew why; are they insane, now—now—the MacKinnons dead a week ago. Dorcas Meadowes’s sister Katie, too, and her husband, and their little girls—  
“She gonna let you hold it?” Sirius asked, to make things all right again.  
“I think she’s going to make me change all the diapers,” James said, and drank again.  
“Don’t drop the kid on its head,” Sirius said. “It’s already got disadvantages, you know, coming from you—”  
“Lily makes up for it,” Remus said, joining in at last, “but if you smack the poor kid’s head on the ground, I don’t know about that—”  
“Oh, fuck off,” James said, and smiled.  
They lay on the roof a long time like that, staring up at the stars. Remus looked halfway asleep. James and Sirius passed the whisky back and forth.  
“Pads,” James said, after a long time.  
“Yeah?”  
“I was thinking.”  
“A rare and dangerous thing, Jamie.”  
“Sod off.”  
A moment. Staring into the dark.  
“What were you thinking?” Sirius said, at last.  
“This kid. My kid. I just— you know. With everything. It’s not just ceremonial, with all this”— James gestured vaguely, encompassing the party, the garden, London, the war. The war. “If anything happens. Would you be godfather?”  
Sirius’s grin was so bright. Remus, who was not asleep, not really, could feel it, could feel the way Sirius was smiling. A little pang of jealousy gripped, briefly, at his heart, and the he shushed it, sent it off. Sirius and James had been friends first, after all, and were nearly brothers; and Sirius was so starved for anything like proper family.  
“Of course, of course I would,” Sirius said. “James—”  
“Potter, put that out right now, you’re going to be a father so you’d better not get lung cancer—”  
Lily, her timing uncanny as always, was climbing out of the window to join them, her hair falling over her face as she pulled herself onto the roof.  
“Right, right,” James said, and stubbed it out, ignoring Sirius’s titter.  
“I hope you told them already,” Lily said, settling herself a little behind the three of them. She laid a hand gently, briefly, on Remus’s shoulder, a slight squeeze. He opened his eyes and sat up.  
“Yeah,” James said. “I was just asking Sirius— you know—”  
“And of course,” Lily said, practical, efficient, as though going over the risks of a potions lesson, “if anything did happen, Remus, we’d want both of you to raise her.”  
“You don’t know it’s a her,” James said.  
“I’m using default female pronouns for everyone from now on,” said Lily, haughtily, her eyes laughing. “Feminist household.”  
“Right on,” said Sirius, over James’s joking groan. “C’mon, Prongsie, it’s got to be almost—”  
“Midnight,” whispered Remus, his voice a little thick, because of the way Lily said that, the way they were all looking at him, at each other, the way Sirius was smiling at him and still the knowledge under his skin that something is wrong wrong wrong, there were ambushes their last two missions that shouldn’t have happened, and there is that and maybe it’s coincidence but Sirius snuck off the other night and wouldn’t tell him where or why— or maybe—maybe it was simpler, maybe it was just that Peter should be there, with them, but Remus couldn’t shake the thought that there was something, just beyond the edge of his consciousness, and if he could only reach it he would know—  
And then the cheers erupted from below and all around, and on the roof the four of them passed the firewhisky, and then Sirius was kissing him and Lily kissing James and then after a moment her voice, low and sweet, almost too quiet, singing, and almost without thinking, Remus sang, too. 

Should auld acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind?  
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,  
And days of auld lang syne! 

For auld lang syne, my dear  
For auld lang syne,  
We’ll take a cup o’ kindness yet  
For auld lang syne. 

January 1, 1996  
(It’s 1996, just now, this minute, and Sirius is smiling for once, a true great grin, and they have stolen champagne for themselves and crept up to his room without even Walburga’s portrait noticing, and Sirius hums quietly to himself, and Remus can’t help but think of the words in English as the rough chorus of voices wafts up to them from below. 

We two have run about the hills  
And pulled the daisies fine,  
But we’ve wandered many a weary foot  
Sin’ auld lang syne. 

We two have paddled in the stream  
From noon to dinner time,  
But seas between us broad have roared  
Sin’ auld lang syne. 

And there’s a hand, my trusty friend,  
And give us a hand of yours  
And we will take a goodwill drink  
For auld lang syne— 

And they are looking at each other, and Sirius is thinking all at once so fast of full moon nights— like the one right after that night in 1980, like the one that will come tomorrow, because all things come full circle, because everything is a cycle, everything spirals and twists and folds back onto itself, he’s thinking in a great vast swirl of images, of moonlit rivers and hillsides and forests, of the wolf rising out of the water, the moon at its back, of their playing together, almost companions—and then of the moons between, twelve years by twelve months is one hundred and forty-four, the things you remember, the stupid things you remember— it seems like it should be more, it seems like it was— and how he always knew that night even when time had unwound itself almost completely, even when he was almost lost in it, had almost unbecome, that shine of full moon on water would drag him back to himself and he’d be at the window, staring out at the empty sea, almost—almost imagining, almost able to hear—the heartbeats and the howls, matched and full—almost find Remus in the wolf the way he’d tried so many times, and distance and time stopped mattering—almost—  
Tomorrow, again, in the new year, tomorrow in the green moon place, the place he never lost, the place that is all places they’ve run under the moon at once, somehow, always, tomorrow they’ll run; tomorrow—


End file.
